FSFE Newsletter - November 2016

na 2016-11

Public consultation on our Fellowship

Since 2005, the FSFE has maintained two distinct
brands: the FSFE and our Fellowship. While this made sense initially,
we've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way this created a
separation between the Fellows and the FSFE as two separate entities,
despite the fact that we're all working together! Accordingly, we've reduced our
activities promoting the "Fellowship" as something distinct from the FSFE,
and now talk more about "FSFE Groups" rather than "Fellowship Groups", for our
local groups.

We now need to come to a decision on how to develop these brands in
the future. Based on an initial discussion between our coordinators and
in our core team, we've developed a proposal which you will find below:
it essentially means that we would deprecate the
Fellowship, and bring everything under the umbrella of the FSFE. As an
important part of our community, your feedback is valuable to us. For
this public consultation, we would be happy to hear your thoughts on the
matter by the 30th of November 2016, after which we will provide a
summary of the feedback received on which we will base our decision.

Any changes that stem from this proposal, in its current form or in
the way we will shape it based on the feedback provided, will be put
into practice during 2017. You can provide your feedback
to contact@fsfe.org.

Please note that in the proposal below we use a term "Supporter" as a
new alternative to "Fellow". We would very much like to hear your thoughts
on this too. Other options suggested include "Patron", "Supporter",
"Contributor", "Donor", and possibly other names you may think of too.
There is also the option to keep the name "Fellow" as a term, and only
deprecate "Fellowship".

PROPOSAL

The "Fellowship" and "Fellow" names are deprecated. Activities done in
local groups or which were otherwise named in conjunction with the
brand "Fellowship" shall be brought under the name of the "FSFE": an
FSFE event, an FSFE local group, and so on.

Our "Community" is anyone who identifies as being a part of the FSFE,
be that by supporting and encouraging our activities, contributing financially,
or participating in the work. We want everyone to be a part of
our community, regardless of their level of engagement.

Anyone who contributes financially with the intent of contributing
regularly is a "Supporter" of the FSFE. The Council may set a minimum
threshold for a regular contribution to account for transaction costs.
Financially, our Supporters provide the solid foundation on which the
FSFE stands: their regular financial contributions give stability
to the organisation. We call our one-time contributors "Donors".

We encourage everyone who wants to be part of our activities to join
one of our teams: either a topical team (as a translator, webmaster, or similar)
or a geographical team (the Berlin team, the Nordic team, and so on).
By joining one of our teams they become a "Team Member" of that team
(system-hackers team member, translation team member).

From the community

Björn Schießle blogs about the
History
and Future of Cloud Federation where he explains the concept of server-to-server
sharing in Owncloud/Nextcloud and its development to a "federated cloud ID",
which looks similar to an email address. Like email, "federated cloud" refers
to a user on a specific server.

What else have we done?

The FSFE's current Vice-president Alessandro Rubini stepped down
to focus on his work with the Free Software community in Italy.
Taking over
from Alessandro is Heiki Lõhmus, a student of aeronautical engineering
from Estonia. Alessandro Rubini is a long time advocate of Free Software:
as the FSFE's Vice-president, he has contributed with invaluable
efforts to push for Free Software, not only in Italy but all over
Europe. Heiki Lõhmus has actively lobbied the Estonian government to
publish the software used for the Estonian elections as Free Software and
now receives the baton for Vice-president of FSFE to carry on
Alessandro’s excellent work.

The system hackers have decided to decommission
our (very) old pad service. They invite anyone who's interested
in the FSFE offering a pad service to get in touch to setup a new team
which can create a new pad service.

Help us to improve our newsletter

Do you think we have missed some news, or you'd like specific
news to appear in the next newsletter? You have been reading about
the FSFE in the press and would like to share this with us? For this and any
other feedback, please share it by writing to newsletter@fsfeurope.org

Donirajte

The Free Software Foundation Europe is a non-profit non-governmental
organisation. Our work is made
possible by a community of
volunteers,
Fellows and
donors. Your donations are critical to our
strength and autonomy. They enable us to continue working for Free
Software wherever necessary, and to be an independent voice.